If you are into political prognostication, it can be useful to look past simple voter registration statistics and into the demographic stats that drive partisan performance.

For this experiment, we wanted to see what single demographic measures most impacted the performance of legislative Democrats. To find the answer we looked at every Democrat in a Florida legslative general election from 2008 to 2012 and evaluated over 100 different demographic variables from each legislative district.

The decision tree diagram below is the result of our analysis. It starts with all 235 general election races and filters them down based on which factor produced the most winning or losing Democrats – that is, which factor best split the winners and the losers.

For example, our first split is with black voting age population. We find that if the district has >15% black voting age population, Democrats won 90% of the time. If the district had <15%, Democrat won 23% of races. The tree then branches down to the next tier which you can see in the diagram below.

Welcome to the Decision MediaWorks blog! We are a boutique data science company that is fired up about helping clients gain insight from mounds of data.

The content on our blog focuses on Florida politics and policy. There’s not a lot of quality data analysis being done on state level issues and Decision MediaWorks fills that while showing off our data chops to potential clients.

We will cover other subjects for sure, but Sunshine State items will certainly be oversampled (data pun!).

We are very interested in your feedback as we roll out content. A lot of the things you will see in the blog are experimental, so we need your help knowing what works and what doesn’t. If you catch an error in our data, find an interactive viz awkward or just think the layout is ugly…let us know.

We want to be a nexus for curious people who say things like “I wonder what the data says about that?”

So, if you’re interested in drilling through the drivel that passes for internet analysis, we think you have a home right here at Decision MediaWorks.com.

Special Note: If you like what you see, please share us with your friends.

One of the big questions in Florida politics right now is how to grow the GOP coalition. The viz below shows a county by county map of where Republicans live and a bar graph showing what percentage of registered Republicans in each county are super voters.

A super voter is someone who has cast a ballot in all of the previous four elections (general and primary). Parties love super voters because they always vote and little time or money needs to be spent motivating them to vote. If one wants to create more super voters (and every political leader does), the best place to start is by studying existing super voters.

The viz below is interactive, please explore and share any trends you see in the data. For any of you budding data wonks out there, the raw can be downloaded for your own exploration.

One of the things we like so much about data visualization is that it makes some things look pretty dang obvious. For example, the Obama 2012 Florida campaign strategy.

The map viz below shows the difference between Obama’s performances from 2008 to 2012 in each house district. The data is adjusted to account for the 2012 legislative redistricting process.

I’ll let the data speak for itself below but first a few items of interest.

- Obama performed worse in most districts with an average -.22% performance decline in house districts. This average decline is largely due to Obama sinking in strong Republican areas. If you only look at swing and Democrat seats, Obama averaged a .50% performance increase.

- Obama’s biggest jumps came in Miami in districts held by Republican house members. His other jumps came in districts heavy with independents and Hispanics. Tampa, Orlando and Miami broke heavily for Obama.

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About Decision MediaWorks

Decision MediaWorks

Decision MediaWorks specializes in turning data into insight. We use the latest in data science to bring clarity to the hard choices made by anyone who follows Florida's unique politics, public policy and culture.

Our focus is on delivering insights that make sense out of publicly available data. We believe the success of any data science project rests on the ability to clearly communicate insights to decision makers.

Questions answered. Tough decisions made easier. That's what we do.

About Joe Clements

Joe Clements, President

Joe's first foray in analytics was estimating the amount of carbon stored in one acre of Ethiopian scrub brush as an intern for the United Nations World Food Programme.

After working for several years in political campaigns and as a legislative staffer, Joe saw that decision making is hard but that good data science (and the presentation of data) can make many decisions easier.

Joe was a Truman and Rhodes scholar nominee at the University of North Florida where he graduated with a degree in public relations. He is currently completing graduate coursework in political management and computer science at Florida State University.

In his non-data science life, Joe is married to Sara, fosters dogs, shoots guns, never misses a Jacksonville Jaguars game and tries to play golf.